The alphabet-soup federal bureaucracies seem to be engaged in a contest to see who can do the most to steamroll the legitimate legislative process and compromise freedom and economic growth.

To date it has been a neck-and-neck race between the EPA, which is pursuing a head-spinningly aggressive anti-energy and anti-development agenda, and the NLRB, which is rewriting federal labor laws to allow union bosses to force workers into unions and infamously sued Boeing for locating in a right-to-work state. Of course, the FDA, HHS, IRS, FCC, and the rest also have been in on the act.

But the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now distinguishing itself as a new contender in the top tier of the worst rogue agencies.

This story was posted over at the Fox News website yesterday...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for bringing it to my attention. The link is here.

Stockton, California, may take the first steps toward becoming the most populous US city to file for bankruptcy next week because of burdensome employee costs, excessive debt, and bookkeeping errors that misrepresented accounts, city officials said yesterday.

The Stockton City Council will meet February 28 to consider a type of mediation that allows creditors to participate, the first move toward a Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing under a new state law. The council will also weigh suspending some payments on long-term debt of about $702 million, according to a 2010 financial statement.

Stockton, a farming center about 80 miles (130 kilometers) east of San Francisco, has fought to avert bankruptcy by shrinking its payroll, including a quarter of the roughly 425-member police force. At 292,000, the city has more than twice as many residents as Vallejo, California, which became a national symbol for distressed municipal finance in 2008 when it sought protection from creditors.

This Bloomberg story, posted on its website late last night, was sent to me by West Virginia reader Elliot Simon...and the link is here.

The office of Senator Jeff Sessions, ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, sends along this chart, showing that America's per capita government debt is worse than Greece, as well as Ireland, Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain.

This chart was posted over at the weeklystandard.com website late yesterday morning...and I thank Phil Barlett for sending it along. The link is here.

I ran the Forbes story about this in Friday's column and then received the following story from reader Ian Nunn with the comment..."You chose to reference the Forbes article. Here's the analysis that debunks it." Mish Shedlock was underwhelmed by that Forbes article...and had this to say about it...

Louis Woodhill, Forbes contributor says he applies "unconventional logic to economic issues". He proves it with this headline report Gasoline Prices Are Not Rising, the Dollar Is Falling

Forget the "logic" and skip straight to reality.

Mish's take on things was posted on his globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com website yesterday...and you can read all about it here.

The record volatility and 400-point up-and-down days in the DJIA of last summer seem like a lifetime ago, having been replaced by a smooth, unperturbed, 45-degree-inclined sea of stock market appreciation, rising purely on the $2 trillion or so in liquidity pumped into global markets by the central printers, ever since Italy threatened to blow up the Ponzi last fall. In short – we have once again hit peak complacency.

This item was posted over at the zerohedge.com website yesterday... and I thank Australian reader Wesley Legrand for sharing it with us. The link is here.

Art Cashin told King World News yesterday that we are witnessing a slow-motion bank run in Greece. Cashin, who is director of floor operations for UBS (which has $612 billion under management), also said it needs watching because if it accelerates it would be the first sign Greece is going to default.

Here is what Art Cashin had to say: "What you are watching, and people always use the example of a slow-motion train wreck, what we are seeing so far is a slow-motion bank run. If you were a Greek citizen and you thought there was some risk that over the weekend suddenly the euro could be replaced with the drachma you would be worried."

This King World News blog is worth reading... and the link is here.

Money is leaking out of banks in southern Europe as customers scoop deposits out of Greece, Spain, and Italy to move cash to less-indebted nations such as Germany.

Greece's total deposits plunged 28 percent from the peak in June 2009 to 169 billion euros ($225 billion) at the end of December, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In Spain, deposits slid 5 percent in the five months through November to 934 billion euros, the least since April 2008. Italian banks held 974 billion euros in November, the lowest in 18 months.

"The biggest systemic risk is if people lose confidence in keeping their euros in Spain, Portugal, or Italy," Perkins said. "It makes sense to put your cash into Germany just to be safe and that's where the real systemic danger lies. That contagion isn't priced in, and bank deposits are the place we'd spot it."

This Bloomberg story, filed from London early yesterday morning, is Roy Stephens' first offering of the day... and the link is here.

Athens has launched the biggest sovereign bond restructuring in history to cut its debt by €107bn (£91bn) – amid warnings from Germany that even if it were successful, there were "no guarantees" Greece could be rescued.

The Hellenic Ministry of Finance on Friday released the highly anticipated offer document, firing the starting gun on a colossal effort to find Greek bondholders and persuade them to participate in a €206bn debt swap. Athens needs bondholders to agree to the deal within days as part of its effort to unlock the €130bn bailout funds needed to avert default on March 20.

Wolfgang Schaeuble warned that the bailout, which was agreed late on Monday night, might not work. In a letter to German politicians, the finance minister said: "It may also not be the last time the German Bundestag will have [to] consider financial aid to Greece. However, the chances of success with alternatives appear to me to be significantly lower at the current time."

This story was posted over at The Telegraph yesterday evening...and is Roy's second offering of the day. The link is here.

The first one is headlined India Charters New Tanker to Ship More Iranian Crude... and the second one is titled Sanctions Not Affecting Iran's Oil Output. Both were posted in the Tehran Times yesterday... and both are courtesy of Roy Stephens.

I have just been sent a copy of Amitai Etzioni's essay China: Making an Adversary, published in International Politics. It has been out for a while but is new to me and will not have been seen by most Telegraph readers.

As you all know, Washington (and the West) is deeply split over how to handle China's spectacular renaissance. This is by far the most important issue in 21st-century geopolitics. It is not one we can afford to get wrong, and errors made today may prove irreversible.

The new term "China hedge" has been coined, used by those who think that the country's growing economic and military might – combined with a new "truculent attitude" – is potentially so menacing that the US must rearm and reorganize its global alliance structure as an insurance policy.

This rather long blog was posted over at The Telegraph yesterday... and I consider it a must read. I thank Roy for sharing this story with us... and the link is here.

Imagine a world without statistics. Governments would fumble in the dark, investors would waste money, and electorates would struggle to hold their political leaders to account. This is why The Economist publishes more than 1,000 figures each week, on matters such as output, prices, and jobs from a host of countries. We cannot be sure that all these figures are trustworthy. Statistical offices vary in their technical sophistication and ability to resist political pressure. China's numbers, for example, can be dodgy; Greece underreported its deficit, with disastrous consequences. But on the whole, government statisticians arrive at their figures in good faith.

There is one glaring exception. Since 2007 Argentina's government has published inflation figures that almost nobody believes. These show prices as having risen by between 5% and 11% a year. Independent economists, provincial statistical offices, and surveys of inflation expectations have all put the rate at more than double the official number. The government has often granted unions pay rises of that order.

What seems to have started as a desire to avoid bad headlines in a country with a history of hyperinflation has led to the debasement of INDEC, once one of Latin America's best statistical offices. Its premises are now plastered with posters supporting the president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Independent-minded staff were replaced by self-described "Cristinistas. " In an extraordinary abuse of power by a democratic government, independent economists have been forced to stop publishing their own estimates of inflation by fines and threats of prosecution. Misreported prices have cheated holders of inflation-linked bonds out of billions of dollars... and we see no prospect of a speedy return to credible numbers.

This story was posted in The Economist yesterday. It's pretty short... and if you have the time, it's well worth the read. I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sending it along... and the link is here.

Scientists in Russia have grown plants from fruit stored away in permafrost by squirrels over 30,000 years ago.

The fruit was found in the banks of the Kolyma River in Siberia, a top site for people looking for mammoth bones.

The Institute of Cell Biophysics team raised plants of Silene stenophylla – of the campion family – from the fruit.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they note this is the oldest plant material by far to have been brought to life.

Prior to this, the record lay with date palm seeds stored for 2,000 years at Masada in Israel.

This enormously interesting read, complete with photos, is well worth your time. It was posted over at the bbc.co.uk website on Monday...and I thank Swiss reader B.G. for sharing it with us. The link is here.

"A new player came into the market and that caught the market substantially offside. It started on Monday. The market was quiet but a lot of option activity was taking place in the market and then again on Tuesday in the physical (market)."

"A bigger player (and a new player) came into the market and it's a central bank. The fact is people don't get what's happening and that tells me the market is going higher."

This blog was posted over at the King World News website yesterday... and the link is here.

Dan Ameduri of Future Money Trends interviewed Chris this month during Cambridge House's California Investment Conference in Indian Wells. He tried to explain how gold price suppression is not "conspiracy theory" but rather longstanding public policy, much of it on the public record. That interview is 12 minutes long and it's posted at the futuremoneytrends.com website... and the link is here.

Venezuela will develop its huge Las Cristinas gold project in partnership with Chinese state investment company CITIC, President Hugo Chavez announced on Friday.

The government last year canceled Canadian company Crystallex International's permit to develop the long-troubled mine project south of the Orinoco River.

Russian-Canadian miner Rusoro had hoped to partner with Venezuela in what could be Latin America's largest gold deposit. Las Cristinas has estimated reserves of 17 million ounces.

This short Reuters story was posted on their website yesterday... and I snatched it out of a GATA release yesterday... and the link is here.

A 17-ton trove of silver coins recovered from a Spanish galleon sunk by British warships on a voyage home from South America in 1804 was set to be flown Friday from the US to Spain, concluding a nearly five-year legal struggle with the Florida deep-sea explorers who found and recovered it.

Spain's ambassador to the United States, Jorge Dezcallar de Mazar, was expected to watch when the two Spanish military C-130s take off from MacDill Air Force Base with 594,000 silver coins and other artifacts aboard, packed into the same white plastic buckets in which they were brought to the US by Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration in May 2007.

The planes were scheduled to depart around 12:30 p.m. Friday. The coins arrived at the base from a secure storage facility in Sarasota and were loaded onto the planes Thursday evening, MacDill authorities said Friday morning.

This AP story was picked up by CBS News yesterday... and I thank reader Scott Pluschau for bringing it to our attention. It's an interesting read... and the link is here.